While chatting with SATAN HATES YOU director James Felix McKenney about his upcoming creature feature HYPOTHERMIA, Fango got the scoop about his next project, VILLAIN, a psycho-shocker inspired by recent reports of real-life superheroes attempting to do good in major cities.

After braving the frozen climes of the Catskills for HYPOTHERMIA, “This film is set in the exotic land of Brooklyn, NY,” McKenney tells us. “It stars a toy-artist friend of mine known as The Super Sucklord, who plays a murdering psychopath who sees these ‘real superheroes’ on the news and decides to use his own skills to take them out. It’s going to be much darker and grittier than anything I’ve done before. My main inspirations for the film are the Asian horror and serial-killer movies of the late 1990s and early 2000s. We’re planning on shooting in New York City this fall.”

Produced by McKenney and Lisa Wisely through MonsterPants Movies, VILLAIN will be lensed by cinematographer Eric Branco, who also shot SATAN and HYPOTHERMIA as well as portions of the upcoming found-footage anthology V/H/S. With a couple of other potential projects having fallen through at the financing stage, McKenney is giving crowd-funding a try on this one, and should have a Kickstarter campaign up this week. “Hopefully that well hasn’t run dry, as we’re a little late to the party,” he says. “But I feel that’s the only honest way to raise money for a movie these days. It’s really hard to look a traditional investor in the eye and tell them they’re going to make money on an indie film project in this current climate. It helps that The Sucklord achieved a little fame last year as a Village Voice cover story, and even more as the breakout character on Bravo’s reality series WORK OF ART: THE NEXT GREAT ARTIST. We’re hoping that with his participation, we can attract some donors outside of the genre-film world by offering unique pieces of his own toy art as incentives. We shall see…”

We’ll keep you informed on how VILLAIN progresses, and you can also keep an eye on its official website and Facebook page. Look for a story on HYPOTHERMIA (coming this fall from Dark Sky Films) in Fango #317, on sale in September.

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